What is new in Biotech

Researchers at MIT and Arizona State University have designed a computer program that allows users to translate any free-form drawing into a two-dimensional, nanoscale structure made of DNA.
Until now, designing such structures has required technical expertise that puts the process out of reach of most people. Using the new program, anyone can...

In terms of the effort-to-smugness ratio, becoming an organ donor is probably just about the best thing you can do with your time. But sometimes, in very rare cases, organ donation can have some unintended consequences. And for one patient in 2018, a life-saving lung transplant came with an unexpected price: a brand-new nut allergy.
“Two weeks...

A kid in France transcribed parts of the Hebrew book of Genesis and the Arabic-language Quran, into DNA and injected them into his body — one text into each thigh.
Adrien Locatelli, a 16-year-old high school student, posted a paper Dec. 3 on the preprint server OS, in which he claimed, "It is the first time that someone injects himself...

While it's true that houseplants do help clean the air within a home, it is estimated that over 20 plants per room would be required to make an appreciable difference. That likely wouldn't be the case with a new genetically-modified ivy, however, which has proven to be highly effective at removing toxic chloroform and benzene from the air.
A...

Hundreds of small robots can work in a team to create biology-inspired shapes without an underlying master plan, purely based on local communication and movement.
To achieve this, researchers from EMBL, CRG and Bristol Robotics Laboratory introduced the biological principles of self-organisation to swarm robotics. The results have been published...

Scientists in Finland have developed what they believe is the world's first vaccine to protect bees against disease, raising hopes for tackling the drastic decline in insect numbers which could cause a global food crisis.
Bees are vital for growing the world's food as they help fertilise three out of four crops around the globe, by transferring...

Collecting cancer cells from patients and growing them into 3-D mini tumors could make it possible to quickly screen large numbers of potential drugs for ultra-rare cancers.
Preliminary success with a new high-speed, high-volume approach is already guiding treatment decisions for some patients with recurring hard-to-treat cancers.
“Believe it or...

An exciting new study from researchers at UC San Francisco has demonstrated how a new kind of CRISPR technique can increase the expression of certain genes, instead of the more traditional technique of actively cutting or editing DNA. The method was tested in mice by targeting two genes associated with hunger, with the animals reducing their food...

Washington State University researchers have reverse engineered the way a pine tree produces a resin, which could serve as an environmentally friendly alternative to a range of fossil-fuel based products worth billions of dollars.
Mark Lange and colleagues in the Institute for Biological Chemistry literally dissected the machinery by which...

Turns out mastering chess and Go was just for starters. On 2 December, the Google-owned artificial intelligence firm DeepMind took top honors in the 13th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), a biannual competition aimed at predicting the 3D structure of proteins.
The contest worked like this: Competing teams were given the linear...